Go Giants by Nick Laird: review

Tom Payne applauds Go Giants by Nick Laird, a collection with a welcome faith
in the form.

No, we mustn’t judge a book by its cover; and it’s just as wrong to review its blurb. That is, unless the blurb is somehow part of the book. The inner flap of Go Giants, the latest collection of Nick Laird’s poems, is a prose poem beginning, “Poetry, they’re pretty sure you’re not worth knowing…” and on it rattles, with references to the Upanishads and phone-in votes. It seems to prepare us for a postmodern confection inside the covers, and so we can already read the title as a two-word poem.

As two-word poems go, it’s impressive, and can be read in opposite ways: is it a dismissal, as in “On your way, Giants” or an encouragement, as in “Go on, Giants!”? This becomes the central question of a book that can be both playful and powerful.

Do we need to honour the past, and its certainties, or should we reject it? Are we standing on the shoulders of those giants, or kicking them in the teeth? Like the title, the poetry oscillates between the two.

In one poem, Laird tells us that “all ceremony is a hoax” and adds that sheep are oblivious to the stone rings through which they wander. (Here, as elsewhere, Laird explores the giddying idea of consciousness, marvelling that our bodies end up being such self-aware things.) But the next poem is boomingly ceremonial.

It is called “Charm for Unfruitful Land” and begins: “Eastward I stand and favours entreat.” It has words in old-fashioned order, and even rhymes.

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So the poetry itself complicates the question. One fun but angry-sounding item is a prose poem listing things the poet could do without: “Seventh, f--- those who want the licence fee cut,” for example. Laird is often playing the game of asking the reader: is this poetic? Is this a poem? Take “History of the Sonnet”, whose first quatrain reads, “Ten./ Nine./ Eight./ I was watching you from over there and I’ve got to say I think you’re great.” The sonnet form is mocked here, but the giant isn’t quite dismissed. The poem has 14 lines, at any rate.

Still, this isn’t quite representative of what Laird does best. A central poem is the wonderful “Talking in Kitchens”. It happens to have 14 lines, and talks us through a perfectly ordinary evening involving a takeaway curry, a baby, a dog and long chats.

But this casual approach to content allows him to approach his big subjects in simple diction: “we feel…/ like nobody knows how we feel and it’s fine.” His closing lines show us what makes it fine. “Here it is written down if I forget to say it –/ my home is the temple made by your hands.”

Those words “home” and “temple” sound risky in the context of this book. There is a bite to some poets at the moment, and you sense it in some of the snarls in Go Giants. “Home” and “temple” could come across as over-sincere or reverent.

But if this book really is asking what we can say in a poem these days, and exploring the extent to which we can share feelings, then such words of love show a welcome faith in the medium’s enduring power.

As other poems here suggest, it’s a power that needs reasserting. A sequence about the flaying of Marsyas, who was punished for outsinging Apollo, is a reminder of how fatal it can be to pit fine lines and lyricism against authority.

And the closing sequence, whose titles come from Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, deals with other sorts of progress – scientific progress and moments that have defined the poet’s own progress. Here he can bark, “what powers live on through us…/ do not give two f---s for us. We do as we are told.” But again, the calm and wonder of the last stanzas offer consolation.

Yes, there are moments when Laird’s poetry is of its time. But at his frequent best he finds the right voice to address and calm the fears of past and future times.